The so-called Cornell Alliance for Science has nothing to do with science but rather is a political front funded by Bill Gates and designed to muster pro-GM activism and package it with a fraudulent pseudo-scientific sheen. Its existence is exemplary of the complete fraudulence and lack of the most basic integrity on the part of today’s universities and scientific establishment. These have long since jettisoned any scientific integrity they ever had and have transformed themselves into nothing but corporate PR fronts. The Cornell/Monsanto project is among the most prominent and formally instituted of these front groups.

Today the Alliance has a new scam going. This is a survey of selected industry tests which purports to analyze whether or not the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is correct in asserting a “consensus” on GMO safety. Self-evidently there is no such consensus, so on its face the AAAS is simply propagating a political lie in claiming there is. See here for another typical AAAS systematic fraud on the public, this one in collaboration with the Pew Center.

As we see, the AAAS itself is a corporate marketing division, not a science organization. So when Cornell’s Alliance analyzes the AAAS’s claim it’s pure theater, one propagandist trying to launder another. I suppose the AAAS then can review the Alliance’s proclamations and find them correct. But just as regulators like the EPA and EFSA do nothing but launder propaganda which is conveyed to them by Monsanto, so these sham pseudo-scientific outfits do nothing but the same. See here for similar lies on the part of the National Academy of Science. Someone needs to design a meme: Monsanto in big letters in the center, with arrows radiating out directly to the names of regulatory agencies and “science” fronts, these names circling the center. That would be an accurate symbolic rendering of reality.

Today’s STEM establishment comprises nothing more or less than a corporate research and propaganda bureau. It considers this corporate science paradigm to constitute science as such, and when they say “science” they mean, in all sincerity, “whatever the corporate marketing department decrees.” History will look back in astonishment and disgust at how the science community threw away its entire legitimacy, laboriously built over centuries, for nothing but to serve as PR flacks for a handful of agrochemical, tobacco, and similar poison-peddling corporations. Why did they do throw it all away? For nothing but the most gutter impulses of hate and power.

Thus the Gates/Cornell Alliance is recruiting “citizen scientists”, which means paid and volunteer Monsanto operatives and techno-fundamentalists, to survey only the abstracts of the selected industry “studies”. This is because all industry tests engage in many kinds of methodological fraud. By sticking only with the abstracts, each of which is just a non-technical summary of the study written according to the interpretative biases of the researchers, the Cornell Alliance plans to suppress knowledge of the massive scientific fraud and propagate only a summation of the non-scientific, political covering statements of the corporate-funded researchers.

For a quick review, all industry tests have been rigged in at least one way: Their length is far shorter than the normal lifespan of the animal, two years in the case of rats. Ninety days is a standard length for corporate rat studies. This is meant to ensure that chronic health dangers are unlikely to manifest during the duration of the test. Most studies also don’t compare the effects of eating the GM feed to the effects of a non-GM diet based on the non-GM equivalent of the GM variety. Nor are the alleged control groups fed a non-GM, non-pesticide laden diet. This is meant to obfuscate any effect which might manifest.

Almost all industry tests are the most minimal kinds of feeding tests, meant to ensure that a CAFO animal fed on GM-based feed will quickly put on weight and not immediately drop dead from acute toxicity. These trials never tested for other kinds of toxicity or for chronic health effects. But the corporations, mainstream media, and pseudo-science media like the Cornell Alliance and the AAAS then fraudulently claim these were legitimate food safety tests with relevance for humans eating such a diet over a lifetime. Picture if we organized a test which would feed human subjects nothing but large amounts of cake, pastries, ice cream, candy, etc. for 60 days (and with no exercise), with our only measure being to test whether the subjects would gain weight and not drop dead. Then afterward we trumpet the test as having proven that such a diet is healthy over the long run. That’s what’s been going on with these corporate feeding trials. True scientists reject these industry tests as nothing but systematic fraud. According to Nuremburg standards the Cornell Alliance propagandists are criminals for propagating this lie.

Even many of these tests nevertheless have found evidence of biological changes and toxicity. Such evidence is routinely dismissed as “insignificant” or suppressed completely by the researchers, often through the methodological fraud of trumping up enough “historical control groups” to introduce enough irrelevant noise to drown out whatever data signal the experiment actually generated. Of course all such evidence is censored out of the study abstracts. This is why Cornell will be citing only the abstracts and not the studies themselves, to censor out of existence any element of the actual studies which goes against the party line.

This latest gambit of the Cornell/Monsanto Alliance for Junk Science is typical of the relentless, congenital lying of all pro-GMO activists. (This is a historical fact. From the beginning in the early 1970s genetic engineers and their publicists and fanboys never were willing rationally to justify and defend their endeavor. On the contrary, from day one they resorted to epithets and insults, and quickly to systematic lying. The culture of the lie is endemic to all such technocratic endeavor.)

Credentialed “scientists” and other cadres are especially shameless and aggressive in their lies, and they provide the lies which then are widely deployed in the mainstream media and by politicians and other publicists. The Cornell Alliance for Science is dedicated to this propaganda mission, receiving the lies from the corporations and re-packaging them as “scientific” truth. Thus they’re now distilling the political abstracts from the industry’s own fraudulent feeding trials and will make their most aggressive attempt to claim these were food safety tests in the first place, and that these tests have found GMOs to be safe.

Thus the Cornell Alliance for Science, with full conscious malice aforethought, will tell the people that dangerous poison is safe to eat. This is the act of a gang of insidious murderers. Humanity must hold them to account.

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What’s most shameful is how cheap they came. In First the Seed Jack Kloppenburg describes how corporations could gain control of university research and propaganda departments by adding a mere few dollars for variable costs on top of the great bulk of public/general funding which those departments mostly used for fixed costs.

But the main reason the universities were bought so cheaply is that from the early 80s onward they were gung ho for biotech on their own tack, for ideological/religious reasons. They seldom needed any special convincing from the likes of Monsanto. The US government gave further impetus with the Bayh-Dole Act which encouraged universities to become more profit-oriented in their own right and build their own patent portfolios. Of course in practice this usually meant, and was designed to mean, profit-seeking and patent-taking in collaboration with corporations. So federal law assisted this corporate takeover.

The Cornell School of Forestry, early in the twentieth century, was the first institute of higher learning to advocate for the clear cut, sustained yield, mono-culture brand of forest management. The Yale School of Forestry was founded, in part, by such financially independent people as Gifford Pinchot and Bob Marshall, to counter this industrial view of the nation’s forest inheritance.

For many in the “conservation community,” these institutions, spread around the country, have worked overtime to instill the “it’s just like any other crop” mentality into forest management at every level. Here, in Oregon, the Oregon State University School of Forestry, not entirely of course, but significantly, pushes the short rotation, mono-culture, herbicide by helicopter, spider web of forest roads style of sylvan management. Big timber interests, including many Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and Timber Management Organizations (TIMOs) support and work to steer the academic/industrial aims of this school of “forestry.”

The Bureau of Land Management and the United States Forest Service both subscribed heavily to this view of watersheds as cornfields, so to speak, for the decades following WWII, up until the adoption of the Northwest Forest Plan, in the mid 1990s. Millions of acres of public lands, many tens of billions of board feet of primary old growth and mature forest were largely clear cut and replaced with plantations, in many instances. This conversion, research has determined, led to chronic, long term summer stream flow deficits. Of course, until banned by law, even these public forest stewards used many thousands of gallons of various aerially applied herbicides, including 2,4 D of Agent Orange fame, routinely applied to eliminate competition with all important Douglas Fir. Needless to say, the damage done to critical natural systems by this model of forestry management was extreme and persistent.

The damage continues apace on the vast private industrial timberlands of Western Oregon. Often interspersed in a checkerboard pattern with BLM and FS lands, these are allowed clear cuts up to 120 acres, with minimum to no green tree retention for wildlife. Thus are public lands too often left isolated, connectivity, bio-diversity very badly impacted. Aerial drift and runoff from those helicopter applied herbicides impacts our public lands, as does runoff from aerially applied, petroleum based nitrogen fertilizers applied to the depleted soils on private clear cut lands. Making matters worse yet, the bulk of revenue derived from forest ownership falls upon the public lands, particularly on those managed in the public trust by the BLM. Ironically, political pressure from elected officials at every level and their supporters in the timber industry, grows more intense by the day. The cut must be vastly increased, they way, while the timber barons pay very minimal property taxes and no longer pay any but the most nominal of harvest taxes, often exporting privately sourced, unprocessed logs in huge quantities to East Asia form ports in Oregon. This, while industry and their supporters in government sue the Feds to increase the cut on public lands.

Ahh, Spring again! Sadly, this is the season when increasing amounts of Syngenta’s endocrine disrupting chemical, Atrazene, will be loaded onto helicopters and broadcast over the Oregon Coast Range and West Slope Cascades! What will our progeny think of us when they realize what we have collectively done in the name of profit at any cost. I doubt they will forgive us.

Thanks Joseph for summing up it well: Monoculture forestry based on maximal commodity production, maximal poison use, maximal destruction, and how it’s interlinked with the other agronomic, environmental, and socioeconomic assaults and crises. And how this campaign is part of the same ideological and propaganda complex, depicted and propagated in the same way by universities and regulators, as the other poisonist campaigns.

Our progeny will consider all this to be by far the worst paroxysm of homicidal-suicidal insanity in human history. They certainly should not, and I hope will not, forgive anyone who undertook or supported it. By now support for it includes all existing political groupings. As of yet there’s only a handful of abolitionists who understand the real problem, the real evil, and what’s really necessary.

[…] perspective he is such a rogue, regardless of what Karl Popper would say. The fact is that the entire scientific establishment is systemically corrupt from the point of view of true falsificationist science, especially ecology, as well as from any […]

[…] for Science” corporate philanthropy and a corporatized university collaborate to set up a junk science propaganda bureau on behalf of the corporate product genre, GMOs. Much of the funding comes from the Gates […]